OUR APPROACH

We bring a collective thirty-five years of experience as culture shifters, popular educators, and facilitators in multi-racial, multi-gender organizing spaces. We are Fat Queer Femmes based in New Orleans, where Mandisa is a sixth generation resident and Shana has lived ethically and responsibly for fourteen years. We have intentionally worked together for eleven years, guiding several organizations through moments of growth with our expertise in infrastructure strengthening, training, and equity work.

Together we've grown and sharpened our shared understanding of power, power dynamics, transformative justice, and working with communities to catalyze collective personal experiences into political praxis. Our praxis is rooted in Abolitionist, Black, Indigenous, Working-Class, Queer Feminist values, and supports our communities in getting stronger and doing better at transforming the oppressive material conditions we live in, to reflect a future in which we can thrive.

SOME IDEAS THAT GUIDE OUR WORK:

◈ We believe in the importance of visioning our work from a place of imagining what it means to be fully and naturally human, with abundant availability of the resources we need to actualize our visions.

◈ When navigating conflict, we look beyond dichotomies of “good/bad”, “right/wrong” and make room for nuances (including opposing truths).

◈ It is essential to not pretend to be neutral.

◈ Leaders who are committed to transparent and accountable authority lean into bravely embracing tensions as spaces that are generative rather than punitive.

◈ The transformative power of vulnerability becomes possible with principled boundaries.

◈ Hierarchy is not inherently oppressive.

◈ All groups function with an arrangement of power. To grow equity, it is necessary to assess how disparities show up in the ways power is distributed and "held."

◈ Healthy power-holding leans into imagination, including what we can learn from experimental models of leadership that have worked to subvert oppressive hierarchies.

◈ Healthy power-holding involves questioning how the needs and priorities of Black and Indigenous people of color, queer people, working-class and poor people, disabled people, immigrants, women, trans, and gender non-conforming people are impacted by decisions, policies, and ways of operating.

◈ Building strong systems of governance and infrastructure within movement organizations is essential to support our communities in gathering, strategizing, and organizing for our collective survival and capacity to thrive.